Hylo’s 2022 Year End Report & how to walk with us on the journey ahead

Published in

Terran Collective

6 min readJan 17, 2023

Dear Hylo Community,

2022 was a full year, and we’re thrilled with the progress of the platform and the amazing partnerships that have shaped Hylo over the past seasons. The upcoming year promises to be even more exciting–with new partnerships on the horizon and an emerging ecosystem of collaborative technology with Hylo at the center of it. The mycelial web of regenerative communities and organizations in our network is growing and we love it.

Milestones from 2022

Overall, 6344 new people joined Hylo in 2022, and 1348 new groups were created. This is slow and steady growth through primarily word of mouth as we have not started marketing Hylo yet.

We completed our first co-development scope with OpenTEAM to make Hylo the community platform for regenerative agriculture! OpenTEAM is now piloting Hylo with five producer networks with a goal to onboard 800+ growers this year to the platform.

We worked with Salmon Nation Trust to bring embedded video to Hylo (and much more) to prepare to host The Edge Prize on the platform. The bioregional community they are assembling will start on Hylo in February 2023.

We worked with the Tribal Resource Center and People-Centered Internet to design and build features to support a peer-to-peer community of tribal members helping each other access broadband connectivity and other resources. We’ve just launched the outcome of that partnership — Collections and Topic-Based Chat!

One Big New Feature — Topic-Based Chat

Topic-based chat channels are now live on Hylo! This brings a Slack or Discord-like experience right into your Hylo group. This is huge! Chat is where real-time interactions happen to build trust and deepen relationships, and hammer out the nitty-gritty details that move collaboration forward.

Chats lower the barriers to connection. It makes it safe to ask a quick question or share a little update, since it bypasses the formality of a post by not requiring a title or meta data. Nowadays folks expect real-time chat in tech tools, so we believe this will make a critical difference in onboarding and adoption of Hylo.

To check it out, head to Topics and click #general in any group you’re a part of. Chats show up here, alongside posts from the group stream. Every topic in your group is now a chat channel, and any post tagged with that topic will appear there as well. This means group stewards have a new and powerful tool to curate collaboration: pin suggested topics to direct people to where the action is in your group!

To understand the full breadth of everything we added and improved on Hylo in 2022, check out the complete list of features here.

What’s coming in 2023

Upcoming development releases

Multi-Language Support: We are working with a partner to implement “Internationalization” — the ability to translate Hylo into different languages so that it is accessible for members around the world. We will launch this feature with Spanish, and we are looking for folks to contribute other language translations as well.
Fully opening up API Integrations including the ability to use Zapier to integrate Hylo with almost any other tool out there you can imagine!
A My Home area where you can easily find all posts you created, interacted with, or were mentioned in.
See more info about our upcoming feature priorities below!

Community Stewardship Support Program

New year, new offering from team Hylo: our Community Stewardship Support Program, aka “Community Stewardship As A Service”. Starting this month, we are piloting a new service to nurture thriving communities on Hylo: partnering with groups to lend our expert community organizers and facilitators to support their successful onboarding to Hylo, and to provide ongoing community management in their group. Stay tuned for the upcoming announcement and info on how to get on the waitlist to access this offering.

OpenTEAM Partnership Next Steps

We are pleased and proud to share that we will be renewing our partnership with OpenTEAM later this year, to support the implementation of their new initiative, the Alliance to Catalyze Transition Incentives through Open Networks for Climate Smart Agriculture (ACTION for CSA). This initiative is supported by a general grant from the US Department of Agriculture’s Partnerships for Climate Smart Commodities program.

What we need

As a non-profit tech commons, we are orienting towards a future where Hylo’s monthly server costs and operating expenses are covered by ethical and sustainable revenue generated by the platform and the stakeholders using it. That includes contributions from people like you!

If you are using Hylo and getting value from it, we’d love for you to contribute on a monthly basis to cover the cost of your use of the platform. Using our Open Collective, you or your group can sign up for a monthly tax-deductible donation to reciprocate at different levels and show your support for Hylo.

If each member of Hylo contributed these amounts, here’s what you’d unlock for us:

$5/month covers server costs (for one member)
$10/month covers server costs plus our lean operations team
$20/month covers the above plus support costs (member support and some development) to ensure things are running smoothly.
$50/month covers all our costs (ops, product, development, design, outreach & relationships) to care for Hylo and continue improving the platform in service to our stakeholders.

We want to start building up enough monthly support this way to be able to sustain the care of this public good technology in the long term. Our first goal is to cover the fixed monthly costs of hosting the software and basic expenses which come to around $5000 / month. Help us meet our goal here.

The opportunity to co-develop Hylo with us

In February, our design/dev team has availability to take on new work. Have you been thinking about using Hylo for your own community, but desiring a few more features before you make the leap? Let’s work together to design and build solutions to your needs on Hylo!

The opportunity to work closely with a talented engineering team at non-profit rates to custom-build tech is extremely rare and exciting. Instead of attempting to engineer your own platform (we really don’t recommend this), let’s develop the community platform of your dreams on Hylo. If you are able to put funding towards technology in service to your group’s purpose, now is the time to jump in and start a partnership with us.

We love working closely with Hylo stakeholders who believe in our vision, are using the platform already, and are aligned in where it needs to go next. Let us know your top priority! You can also check out our roadmap here to see the features we want to build next, and let us know if you are aware of sources of funding that can get us moving on any of them.

Here are some of the specific features we are prioritizing next that we would love to complete to prepare Hylo for a major public launch:

Stewardship tools for community self-governance (decentralized decision making, participatory budgeting, roles & responsibilities)
Collective moderation (to distribute accountability among all group members)
Elevating the mobile app experience (for better inclusion of mobile-first members)
Performance optimizations & a full security audit

If you are interested in funding any of these scopes of work, please get in touch at clare@terran.io or tibet@terran.io!

The puzzle pieces are clicking into place

Journeying together

Thank you for walking with us on the Hylo journey. We are grateful for every member of our community for being part of this exciting experiment. Building a public good, open-source software project as a non-profit, in the open, hand in hand with folks like you is a huge honor. We can’t wait to see what the new year holds for us all.

In solidarity and with gratitude,

Team Hylo